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The series of his rhetorical works has been preserved nearly complete, and consists of the De Inventione, De Oratore, Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus, Orator sive de optimo genere Dicendi, De partitione Oratoriâ, Topica, and de optimo genere Oratorum.
It is evident that Cicero preferred Crassus, for he assigns him the chief place in his dialogue de Oratore, and makes him the vehicle of his own views. Moreover, he was a man of much more varied knowledge than Antonius. An opinion prevailed in Cicero's day that neither of them was familiar with Greek literature. This, however, was a mistake. Both were well read in it.
All that we have from his pen up to this time has been preserved for us by the light of those great works which he now commenced. In this year, B.C. 55, there appeared the dialogue De Oratore, and in the next the treatise De Republica. It was his failure as a politician which in truth drove Cicero to the career of literature.
The fruits of his mature judgment were preserved in the De Oratore, a dialogue between some of the great orators of former days, in three books, written 55 B.C. The chief speakers are Crassus and Antonius, and we infer from Cicero's identifying himself with the former's views that he regarded him on the whole as the higher orator.
But he was not on that account disabled from preparing for his son these instructions, in the form of questions and answers, on the art of speaking. We next come to the Brutus; or, De Claris Oratoribus, a dialogue supposed to have been held between Brutus, Atticus, and Cicero himself. It is a continuation of the three books De Oratore.
Born in 106 B.C., assassinated in 43; celebrated as orator, philosopher, statesman, and man of letters; served in the social war in 89; traveled in Greece and Asia in 79-77; questor in Sicily in 75; accused Verres in 70; prætor in 60; as Consul supprest Catiline's conspiracy in 63; banished in 58; recalled in 57; proconsul in Cicilia in 51-50; joined Pompey in 49; pronounced orations against Mark Antony in 44-43; proscribed by the Second Triumvirate in 43; of his orations fifty-seven are extant, with fragments of twenty others; other extant works include "De Oratore," "De Republica," "Cato Major," "De Officiis," and four collections of letters.
We owe to him the later books of Ammianus Marcellinus, the 'De Oratore' of Cicero, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy the best manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lubeck. With noble confidence he lent his books to those who asked for them, allowed all comers to study them in his own house, and was ready to converse with the students on what they had read.
In the treatise De Republica, which was begun in 54 B.C., though not published till three years later, he carried the achievement of Latin prose into a larger and less technical field that of the philosophy of politics. Again the scene of the dialogue is laid in a past age; but now he goes further back than he had done in the De Oratore, to the circle of the younger Scipio.
The same influence caused Cicero in his youthful De inventione to classify rhetoric as part of political science, and in the De oratore to make Antonius restrict rhetoric to public and communal affairs, although in another section he returns to Aristotle's "any subject" as the material of rhetoric as does Quintilian later.
In his inquiries he will find that the Cicero, if he look to Quintilian or Tacitus or the Crassus, if he look to Cicero is so set before him as the true model; and with that he may be content. The De Oratore is by far the longest of his works on rhetoric, and, as I think, the pleasantest to read. It was followed, after ten years, by the Brutus, or De Claris Oratoribus, and then by the Orator.
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